[Zach has] long been a sucker for the polar area/coxcomb/rose charts popularized by Florence Nightingale. These multivariate charts can show ordered or unordered categorical data. As noted in an Economist piece on influential information graphics,

As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this.

I wanted to produce some just for kicks, so looked around for a script in AS3. No dice. OK, any language? Didn’t see anything. So I sat on the idea for a while and then finally thought up the technique that made producing them in AS3 quite easy. With the resultant classes, producing graphics like the following small multiples of U.S. soldier deaths in Iraq is a snap. The classes are written in AS3, so can be used with Flash, Flex, or mxmlc. All the example screenshots below are PNGs captured from SWFs produced with only AS3 (extended Sprites). To see the code (which includes a lot of ugly annotation), click ‘view source‘ below any image. All source code is included in the ZIP distribution linked below.